There are plenty of studies about the effects of social media on our brains. Some say apps like Instagram and TikTok are hurting our brains. Others say it’s actually turning our brains into toxic waste dumps. It’s a wide and diverse array of findings. But about the rest of the body from the brain down?
A pair of researchers from the Department of Psychology at Durham University in the UK dug into the physiological responses elicited by social media. They found that even just a little bit of scrolling through your favorite social network can have a really weird effect on your body: people’s heart rates slow down, but they sweat more.
Researchers Find Scrolling Social Media Makes You Sweaty
It was a small study. The researchers asked 54 young adults to browse Instagram for 15 minutes while monitoring their heart rate and their skin conductance, a.k.a. how much sweat they produced.
Compared to reading the news on your phone, scrolling through Instagram made people’s heart rates slow down yet made them produce more sweat. This means people were deeply immersed in social media in a way that could almost be described as Zen-like.
When the participants were purposefully interrupted and asked to switch from social media to a new story, they kept on churning out sweat while their heart rates steadily rose. Things got a little strange when the participants were asked to completely disconnect.
They reported feeling stressed and anxious with many of them feeling the itch to log on. You might better know this as a warning sign of addiction, a dependency on something that claws at your insides when you’re not directly engaged with it.
The study doesn’t attempt to answer the question of whether we’ve developed a physical addiction to social media. But it does heavily suggest that social media does indeed have addictive elements. And even if it were an addiction it wouldn’t operate like a substance addiction.
As the researchers say, social media taps into our desire for connection and validation. If it is an addiction, but we were addicted to something that isn’t necessarily a high, but rather we were addicted to the bonds social media forms between people. No matter how distant and no matter how fleeting or inconsequential that bond may be.
The worst part is that the researchers found that the physiological responses were present in everyone across the board—no matter how high or low they scored on a questionnaire that assessed the symptoms of social media addiction. No one is safe from the physical effects of social media. It’s just a matter of whether you let it rule you.
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